Re: New work on fonts at W3C

Hi Chris,

>> If today's font foundries aren't willing to trust their customers,
>> they will be replaced by companies that are.
> 
> That's a rather scorched-earth philosophy.  How many talented font
> hinters (read: people capable of making readable body-text-size screen
> fonts) do you think there are in the world?
> 
> I read this idea as a realization that hey, TTF/OTF was not designed for
> this scenario; maybe it doesn't actually give enough information FOR
> this scenario.  You know, rather than dismissing out of hand the idea
> that maybe a more targeted, cooperatively designed solution might need
> to be developed.

On this point, actions speak louder than words.  Rather than kvetch
about TTF/OTF direct linking, it would help things immensely if
Microsoft were to publicly participate in discussing these matters and
make improvements in Internet Explorer to make using @font-face less
painful than it is today. After simply pushing EOT as "the answer" to
this problem, very little has been done by Microsoft to participate in
cooperative discussions of the solution.  I'm thinking mostly of the
Microsoft Typography folks who were pushing the original EOT plan, not
the IE folks per se.  The Typography folks didn't attend the TPAC
discussion last fall and appear to have lost interest after the EOT
proposal was rejected.

It's hard to listen to dictates on the solution here when Microsoft
seems disinclined to participate in finding a solution at the same time
other Microsoft API's such as Silverlight actively highlight their
support for linking to TTF fonts.

Simply quoting captive IE market share numbers as your trump in
determining "consensus" is not really a valid metric.  Better support
for @font-face features [1], even if just for EOT, and active
participation in discussions would be much more helpful.

Regards,

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

[1] Feature improvements needed in IE @font-face implementation:
  * support for font-weight, font-style descriptors
  * Postscript CFF font (.otf) support in t2embed.dll
  * better tools than WEFT for making EOT versions of fonts (including not crashing when .otf fonts are present)

Received on Friday, 19 June 2009 01:43:27 UTC